


Grounded

by tsukinofaerii



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Gen, POV Child, Spoilers, existential cuteness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:01:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27496117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsukinofaerii/pseuds/tsukinofaerii
Summary: Thanatos had always known Death would be the last thing left when everything else had gone. He'd just thought he'd at least be big enough to reach the top of a table when it happened.
Relationships: Thanatos & Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 124





	Grounded

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, um. Hi? Long time no post. I wouldn't say I'm back in the game, but it's been a while since I finished something I actually wanted to make public, so it seemed a shame to leave it to languish. Minimally edited, with apologies for that! Please check the end notes for vaguely worded warnings and spoiler notes that are as spoiler-free as I could make them.

The silence was _wrong._

Thanatos sat at the edge of the Pool of Styx and held tight to his feet. He was little, and usually the great hall felt immense. It soared up over his head, and it was filled with sound. Shades talked to each other while they waited. Guard armor clinked. The cleaners and contractors did their work with crashes of stone and tinks of metal so soft they might have been music.

All of that had gone away. It felt small and smaller with every second that failed to tick by. All of the shades had vanished, down to the contractor with their tools and the cleaners with their feather dusters. The big man, the one mother called Lord, had run out and taken Cerbie with him.

Bit by bit the noise had faded away, and nothing had taken its place. Even the Styx, which always sounded happy, had turned all soft and muffled. The colors had dimmed away, and grew duller as he watched. When Thanatos leaned over it there weren't any ghostly figures waiting to arrive, no faces or waving arms to grab. If he fell in, he thought he might just sink.

He watched as one of the flowers the Queen had planted by the Pool slowly nodded downward and closed its bloom. When he risked letting go of a foot to poke it, it didn't respond, not even to wither. There was nothing to take. It was just a lifeless hunk of _stuff_. Not even a flower anymore.

Usually, Thanatos liked when it was quiet. Peace suited him. It was a good time when Alecto wasn't yanking Meg's hair and Tisiphone wasn't screaming. When it was quiet he could hear the people who were far away but also in his head. He liked to tell them it was okay, and all they needed to do was come home. They didn't always listen, but he tried, and he couldn’t try when it was too noisy.

There was no peace left in _this_ silence, though. Instead it was all still, and empty, and _ended._ Young and new to conscious existence as he was, Death knew the Underworld was supposed to be about beginnings, not endings.

His fingers dug into his feet tighter, the way Mother Nyx had taught him to keep them from wandering. He wanted to wander, wanted to vanish off to be anywhere else that was far away from the suffocating loneliness that made his skin crawl and his chest feel empty.

Thanatos huffed and looked around for an adult but of course, there wasn't one in sight. They were there when he wanted to ride Cerbie or climb one of the Queen's trees, but never when he _actually_ needed them. Still holding his feet, he rocked back into his shoulders so he could even peer up into the dark spots in the rafters. No grown-ups there either. Then, carefully, he rolled upright, planting one foot and then the other carefully down on the floor. Once the ground was holding them, he let go and stood up.

Maybe there was a place to turn the life back on. He'd just have to find it.

Getting around the Great Hall on short legs was hard work. There was _so much of it_ , and all of it was too big and too heavy. But he couldn't risk floating. That was when his feet got lost most of all. So he made sure to look around everywhere he could see first, always with one foot down, before he started on the high places. He climbed up on the Big Chair and checked behind all the parchments on the desk, and then under the piles too. He looked in the West Hall where the Styx was prettiest before it went all gray, and then the empty Boring Room which had lost all of its shades, and under _all_ the statues and urns and weird metal flower things that the Queen liked.

He dug in the smashed bits of gold and gems after that. Just in case.

For all his hard work, he didn't find anything. Not even the ghost of a mouse. Everything was empty. Empty and ended and he _hated it_.

Growing more frustrated with every corner he turned, Thanatos stomped his way across they Great Hall as loudly as he could. Even his feet had gone all muffled. It almost frustrated him enough to try floating, since at least that wasn't supposed to make noise. The doors to the garden were closed. Maybe _that_ was where it was. If it wasn't, he'd wander. He'd _find_ it and he'd make it better. Somehow.

Luckily for Thanatos's growing sense of righteous indignation, he didn't have to go as far as the garden doors. Tucked behind a corner past the Big Chair, Mother Nyx floated overhead, curled up around herself like Hypnos basically all the time. Darkness swirled around her in this strings, pulsing softly. As he watched, more poured out of her and then twisted around, vanishing into something held tightly against her chest.

She looked like she was asleep. Thanatos frowned and tugged at the dangling edge of her deep purple peplos. As far as he knew, Mothers didn't sleep, annoying twin brothers did. But no matter how hard he pulled, she didn't stir at all. He climbed as high as he could without making the ground let go of his feet and she _still_ didn't wake up.

Gritting his teeth, Thanatos set one foot on his mother's and then the other. Then he started climbing. It was harder than the Big Chair or any of the statues to keep one foot on her. She swayed as he climbed, and sometimes what he thought was a good foothold turned out to just be cloth. He heaved and panted and strained, and eventually, with great pride in his victory, swung himself over to perch atop his mother's knees.

As it turned out, the thing in her lap was a brother-shaped bundle of blankets, though smaller than Hypnos and topped with a wild tuft of black hair that poked out like charred skeleton fingers. He thought it might be a baby. His mother's darkness poured into it like water going down an endless hole. It drank and drank and drank, because there was nothing to catch it.

Thanatos frowned. He knew what he needed to do: he needed to turn the life back on. It was just that he didn't know how. Usually he did things the other way. When he pressed his hands into the blankets, he could feel everything being clawed away. All the sound and happiness and new things just tumbled down into the hole. He could tell it was trying to pull him in too, the way it had taken his mother and all her power, but he had his feet down. He couldn't go anywhere when his feet were down, and there was so much in line before him that the hole gobbled that down first instead.

It would finish up eventually though. Then he'd be the only one left. He'd always known he would be, at the very end of all stories, but he thought he'd at least be able to reach the top of a table first.

"It's not time for that yet," he told the baby as sternly as he could. The silence had gotten so heavy it took his voice too, gobbling it up and reaching down his throat for more. "Stop it. You should wake up. Everything's much nicer when you're awake."

Predictably, it didn't. Babies never listened. Well, Hypnos never listened, and his brother was practically a baby, so it might as well have been the same thing.

He leaned in close and tugged at the blanket, uncovering a tiny baby ear and raising his voice. "I _said_ , you need to wake up!"

Still nothing. Yelling usually worked, even on Hypnos, but the baby just wouldn't move. The darkness, the world kept pouring into it, and it didn't seem to care. It was just a hole. A big, hungry, empty spot where life was supposed to be but, for some reason, wasn't. 

Thanatos heaved a sigh that felt as big as the universe, and squinted at his tiny adversary. There was a thread. There had to be a thread, there was _always_ a thread. And, after a painful minute of looking, he spotted it. It was barely there, a tiny little piece of fading starlight that vanished off into nothing. And it tangled around _everything,_ from Mother Nyx all the way down to the shine on the mirror and then down through the Styx. As he watched it reeled more and more away— _the feel of a kiss against his brow, and then the smell new flowers from the garden—_ taking them all away.

Usually Thanatos would have cut it. When a thread got tangled or when it was holding someone in place, he cut it and then he took the person back home for the adults to help and Mother got that look like she was not saying things very loudly in her head. But glowing threads didn't cut. He'd tried cutting Hypnos's thread once and had been sent to the nursery _forever_ and then he still had a twin brother for some reason. Even though it was very faint, he was pretty sure the baby's thread wasn't going to cut either.

He grabbed at it, but the thread passed right through and his fingers just stabbed into the baby instead. Thanatos glared, and the thread didn't care. It just kept tugging along, taking the taste of fresh pomegranates next, and the fuzz of new fur.

It was time for the big one.

He picked up his feet.

When he touched it for the second time, the thread felt like lightning in his hand. It slid and burned against his skin as it tried to keep it from rolling. More things tried to slide past— _the vibration of lyre strings at the start of a song, the birth of a laugh in his throat_ —and he held onto them as tight as he could. They were _his_. The emptiness couldn't have them.

It was hard. So hard to hold on and not let anything go. But Thanatos had a big brother, a Hypnos and three sisters, sort of. Tug of war wasn't a new game. He wrapped the thread tight around his fingers and yanked.

It pulled back. It didn't want to stop eating, but when his feet wandered there was nothing for it to hold. He panted and tugged, refusing to give up anything else. And it _worked_. The thread slowly stopped vanishing down into the empty place and then, inch by inch, it came back. Thanatos didn't let go for even a second. He wrapped himself in the thread like a rope, keeping it tight around his heart so it couldn't get even a little bit back no matter how much it wanted to.

Time never really meant much in the House. It wasn't like Outside, where it was bright sometimes and he had to wait for the light to go away so Mother could find him. Even so, it felt like he was pulling forever before things started changing again. He pulled back the flicker of a new lit candle and the fluffy-fresh pillow he stole from Hypnos and the scrape of a knee. Bit by bit, he pulled and pulled until they all spilled back out.

Finally, _finally,_ the end of the thread appeared. A tiny golden knot dangled from it, twisted and tangled in a ball bright as the sun. The emptiness sucked at it too, making it bob and weave. Thanatos reached, stretching as hard as he could, until his fingers tangled in the knot and yanked it all the way back where it belonged.

It was like the whole world came back in one loud rush. The Styx brightened and started splashing. Sound echoed all the way up into the rafters, just the way it should. Back in the nursery he could hear Hypnos whining about being woken up and the slapping sounds of Alecto trying to hit him for it. 

The bundled up baby in Nyx's lap stirred. Mismatched eyes opened, one green and the other red as the Styx. It blinked in wide-eyed fascination at the world it almost hadn't gotten to see. 

And then it started screaming.

Thanatos flailed backwards off his mother's knees, tumbling downward. Air fluffed gently around him as his feet panicked. His fall ended in a splash as he reappeared the Pool of Styx, warm red water washing up over his head. He sputtered to the surface, helpful hands keeping him afloat and passing him to the steps since he couldn't swim yet.

At the front of the Hall, his mother was racing across to the West Wing, screaming baby held tight to her chest. Thanatos plopped himself on the steps of the pool. Like a wick that had been re-lit, everything started coming back to life. Shades slid out of the water and past him to get in line in the Hall. Someone wondered loudly what broke all the urns. Over in the lounge music started again. It was only a few notes as Orpheus tested out his strings, but they had the heart of a song in them.

Thanatos held onto his feet, listened, and smiled. 

**Author's Note:**

> The story revolves around the time period of Zagreus's birth. If you haven't cleared the final boss for the first time yet, you might want to skip this one.


End file.
